What We Want Out of a ’Legend of Zelda’ Movie

Nintendo is making a live-action film adaption of The Legend of Zelda–a game franchise best known for its silent protagonist, an infinitely repeating plot, and a timeline so convoluted that trying to understand it inevitably drives one to madness. How do you adapt something like that into a two-hour film?

It’s tempting to say, “No one asked for this,” but that’s true of movies based on theme park rides, British teddy bears, and plastic blocks. Sometimes they’re pretty good! There is no law that says movies based on video games—or any established intellectual property—must suck. And now that Nintendo has gotten a taste of that juicy box office, a Legend of Zelda movie was inevitable anyway.

Personally, I’m not a fan of assuming that just because a piece of art is based on preexisting IP, it must be bad. If anything, I see it as a compelling challenge. Artists constantly find themselves positioned against overwhelming entities driven by accumulating power, yet they still find the courage to create anyway and, with a little wisdom, outsmart the systems they work within that want to consume everything. It’s how we get some of the best art we know.

All of that is the most head-in-ass, pretentious way to introduce a simple question: What would make a Legend of Zelda movie actually good? … Alan, this is absurd, cut all this. (Editor's note: No, lol.)

I could link to Nathan Grayson’s excellent piece at worker-owned gaming site Aftermath and leave it at that. As Grayson puts it:

Link is a twink of action. He communicates with his deeds. If somebody tells him that their village halfway across the world has been overrun by ruffians, Link just goes off on a days-long journey, blasts the ruffians to smithereens with his comically OP Zonai cannon spear, rebuilds the entire village, and then walks all the way back to shock his new acquaintance by wordlessly conveying that the job’s done – effectively leaving them speechless. Who needs to talk when you can do that?

No further argument is necessary, but I will still attempt to take it a step further. Since the release of The Ocarina of Time, the three primary characters of the series—Link, Zelda, and Ganon(dorf)—have been represented by the three forces of the Triforce: Courage, Wisdom, and Power (respectively).